Thesiss

Public health policy is one of the main mechanisms for establishing and enforcing borders locally and globally. In an era when few simple effective therapies existed for infectious diseases, public health officials sought to prevent the spread of disease by improving the underly…

This is an ethnographic study of the processes of identity negotiation within a community of Indonesian migrant workers in South Korea, a Borderlands where a diversity of cultures collude and collide. I explore the ways that this community of diasporic people use narratives both…

This dissertation examines the history of Borana sub-province, a peripheral region that straddles the strategic borders of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. Since its conquest by the Ethiopian imperial state in the late 19th century, Borana and its Oromo- and Somali-speaking pastora…

This dissertation explores the construction of the post-communist political imaginary as an attempt to translate the vagaries of liberal democracy in to the certainties of post-Soviet epistemology. The ambiguities of the political are refracted through the "independent Republic …

Archaeological research presented in this dissertation confronts assumptions about the spatial patterning of Harappan pottery in borderland regions of the Indus Civilization (2600-1900 BC), a geographically expansive ancient state located across Pakistan and northwestern India. …

This dissertation is an inquiry into the naturalization of war. It examines forms of life in a rural borderland that is also a battlefield through an ethnographic exploration of the intertwining of war and everyday living on Lebanon's southern border with Israel. Life in these p…

This is an ethnopolitical study of the majority non-Han, Muslim province of Xinjiang in China’s far northwest during the transition from empire to nationalizing state. After achieving provincial status in 1884, the final decades of Qing rule witnessed fatally weakened attempts b…

Esta investigación utiliza el ritual religioso-universal del catolicismo para analizar la participación de grupos indígenas, mulatos, mestizos, y de las mujeres de la élite, en fiestas religiosas, cofradías y capellanías que tuvieron lugar en el pueblo minero de San Joseph del P…

This study explores borderlands as a function of the imposition of the post-colonial state upon primary structures of identity, polity and social organisation which may be sub-state, national or trans-state in nature. This imposition, particularly in the postcolonial experience …

In general, Silk Road history has been dominated by the imperialist perspective resulting in the loss of historic voice of those who inhabit Central Asia. Historical perspectives have been dominated by political and military lens, which only provide a small portion of the Silk R…

This dissertation charts an intellectual genealogy of internationalist visions of the reorganization of the imperial Russian space that were frustrated and foreclosed by the emergence of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1922, surviving and continuing to develop in exile communi…

This study investigates the connection between borders, society and environment in the borderlands between Sudan and South Sudan and attempts to expand our understanding of the process of border-making and its effects on the local population and on the spatial dynamics.

This thesis focuses on the Sabine Strip, the land between Natchitoches, Louisiana, and Nacogdoches, Texas, as an alternative to the Neutral Ground as it extends into modern day Texas. Its parameters, and its historians, fail to look past the Sabine River at its greater connotati…

American westward expansion dominates the history of the nineteenth century. Two instances of this expansion involved armed rebellion. West Florida was the first armed revolt that preceded American annexation of a formerly European territory. Led mostly by Americans, the West Fl…

“Rightful and Moral Work: Rethinking Free Labor and Sex Work at the California-Baja California Borderlands, 1877-1937” explores Mexican working-class identities from a transnational perspective. I argue that Mexican workers, specifically agricultural workers and sex workers, lev…

During the late 1700s and early 1800s in Spanish Florida, a successful maroon community developed within the walls of Prospect Bluff, a fort situated on the Apalachicola River. The community was originally established by the Spanish in order to provide resourcedeficient Florida …

Between Empire and Nation provides a spatial history of Egypt's western borderland in order to illuminate the Egyptian nation-state as a work-in-progress in the decades prior to World War I. It argues that state and nation did not come fully formed to Egypt's western domains, bu…